The Ethereum Foundation has presented a long-term technological roadmap for the network's development, planned for implementation until 2029. The new concept, named Lean Ethereum, involves a fundamental revision of the protocol architecture — comparable in scale to the transition to Proof-of-Stake during The Merge. This is not about incremental improvements, but a full-scale transformation of the decentralized system.
Five "Guiding Stars" of the New Roadmap
At the core of Lean Ethereum are five key goals, which developers have called "guiding stars." The first is accelerating the base layer: the current slot time of 12 seconds and finalization time of 16 minutes will be gradually reduced to 8, 6, 4, and possibly even 2 seconds. The second is increasing L1 throughput to approximately 10,000 TPS through the implementation of zkEVM and real-time proof generation. The third is scaling L2 to the "teragas" level, i.e., around 10 million TPS, which will require a new approach to data availability. The fourth is implementing post-quantum security based on hashing, resistant to attacks from quantum computers. The fifth is privacy: developers intend to implement hidden ETH transfers that conceal transaction details in the public blockchain.
A key element of the restructuring will be the new consensus mechanism, Minimmit, which will accelerate finalization by 120 times — from 16 minutes to 8 seconds.
Glamsterdam and Hegota: Upcoming Hard Forks
The next Ethereum upgrades are Glamsterdam and Hegota. The first is expected in the second half of 2026 and includes the ePBS mechanism (separating block building and attestation tasks) and Block-Level Access Lists (BAL), which will increase the gas limit and reduce costs. According to Buterin, the Hegota upgrade will be the last "before the Lean era" and will focus on improving scalability and optimizing data management.
Cryptography, Consensus, and Performance
In the new architecture, classical transaction verification will give way to recursive STARK proofs. This will eliminate the need for each node to directly re-execute operations, making the system more efficient. Privacy has been elevated to a top priority: the design of the mempool and interaction infrastructure will incorporate the possibility of shielded transfers.
Special attention is given to post-quantum security. The Ethereum Foundation plans to complete the transition to quantum-resistant algorithms by 2029. As an interim solution, the SPHINCS+ method has been proposed, which can secure accounts for just $0.07 without a full-scale hard fork. This is critically important, as the emergence of powerful quantum computers in the next decade could threaten account signatures, validator signatures, BLOB objects, and part of ZK systems.
The Most Controversial Part: Restructuring State Storage
Buterin called the restructuring of state storage the most radical part of the plan. The idea is to keep the familiar dynamic state almost unchanged but add new types of storage designed for much larger volumes. By 2030, the picture could look like this: about 2 TB of the old type and up to 100 TB of the new type. The second option would be suitable for ERC-20s, NFTs, and many DeFi scenarios, but not for complex contracts like Uniswap. According to Buterin's estimate, moving an ERC-20 token to the new storage scheme via UTXO would reduce fees by more than ten times.
However, the question of incentives for storing the growing volume of data remains open. Developers have set this topic as a separate research direction, along with creating a second virtual machine alongside the EVM.
Community Reaction and Expert Perspective
The crypto industry has generally received the plan positively. StarkWare co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson praised the focus on recursive STARKs and quantum security but called the timeline too long. Former Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist suggested completing it within a year, pointing to AI tools as a potential accelerator.
However, some ETH holders see things differently. Users note that fees still spike to $50 under real load, and the price of ETH is only 1.8 times higher than at the time of The Merge. Questions about validator motivation and the timeline for implementing the "new Merge" remain open.
My professional analysis: Lean Ethereum is an ambitious and technically mature plan that sets a clear development direction. However, the main risk is time. Will Ethereum manage to restructure its cryptography before real quantum threats emerge, and will users feel the difference before the multi-year plan is completed? For now, the answers to these questions remain unclear, and the market awaits concrete results, not promises.